// project
A Hinglish social-deduction bluffing game of power, satire & second chances. Gaddi ke liye kuch bhi karega.
The brief
Gaddi is a Hinglish social-deduction bluffing game set in a satirical India corporate-political underworld where six archetypes scheme for an empty chair, the Gaddi, and everyone is lying about what they hold. The Neta makes promises he'll forget tomorrow, the Bhai owns silence, the Babu approves nothing, the Jugaadu knows a shortcut, the Vakil has read every exception. Satire targets the archetype, never the person. Under the deadpan Hinglish voice ("सब मिले हुए हैं") sits a serious engineering exercise: one deterministic Kotlin engine that runs identically on Android, iOS, desktop and the web, and powers the AI, the UI and a server-authoritative backend from the same code.
What shipped
// case study
The problem
A hidden-information bluffing game handed every player the same expert board on turn one, suspicion odds and a live teleprinter log included, which is exactly the kind of interface that loses a first-timer before their first bluff.
The decision
Split the board into three density layers a player graduates through by playing, not a settings toggle: FOCUS shows only whose turn it is, one plain-language line, and your legal moves; GUIDED adds coaching; ANALYST is the full instrument panel.
The result
All three layers, the AI, and a future server read the same deterministic (GameState, Intent) → GameState engine: the density decision is a UI skin, not a fork in the rules.
4 platforms · one engine
Watch the two-minute tour ↓
// guided tour
A storyboarded walkthrough of the real app — tap the speaker for the voiceover, or read along with the captions.
// shipping
Every line below is checkable. Add the repository in an F-Droid client and the app installs, signed with the same key its listing pins.
// pipeline
Read live from GitHub Actions and the F-Droid index. Not a badge: the actual runs, what shipped, and the certificate you can check the download against.
reading the pipeline
4
platforms · one engine
10
AI bot personas
6
roles · 4 story arcs
7
toggle rule variants
// multiplatform
The real screens (and, where it's live, the running build) per platform — not a mockup.
Rendered at phone dimensions from the shared Compose UI.
// design notes
The whole game is a pure function: (GameState, Intent) → GameState, with the RNG seed living inside the state. The same module drives single-player, the bots and a future server. Any match can be replayed byte-for-byte from its seed and intent log.
The board reveals itself in three density layers so a first-timer isn't handed an expert's dashboard. FOCUS shows only whose turn it is, one plain-language line of what just happened, your hand and your legal moves; GUIDED adds gentle coaching; ANALYST is the full instrument panel (suspicion pips, odds, teleprinter log). Players graduate FOCUS → GUIDED → ANALYST by playing. Paired with a tap-to-continue beat gate so the round never resolves faster than you can read it, and a tutorial-first onboarding funnel that teaches one mechanic at a time.
A diegetic court-scribe turns raw engine events into one calm in-character line, grounded strictly on the redacted PlayerView so it narrates the beat without ever leaking a hidden card or inventing the board. It renders the deterministic templated line instantly and upgrades in place if an LLM is available (on-device Gemini Nano / Apple FoundationModels / BYOK cloud), never enters the intent log, and leaves byte-for-byte replay untouched.
Bots use Information Set Monte Carlo Tree Search (1.5k-16k iterations depending on difficulty tier) with an optional cloud-LLM upgrade (Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini). Built on kmp-toolkit's own generic bots-policy shell (Policy/GameRules/Ismcts/SearchBudget, zero deps), not a bespoke search implementation. Ten personas each have a personality profile driving targeting and bluff frequency. The DARBAR layer lets bots form alliances, hold grudges and trade Hinglish table-talk across four story arcs. Social manipulation that never breaks engine determinism.
A hidden-information game needs strict secrecy: redact(state, viewer) → PlayerView guarantees a client only ever sees what its player should. Two independent narrative RNG streams keep flavour separate from game logic.
A bespoke lamplit visual language: teak/brass/cream palette, Rozha One display type, Canvas-drawn intaglio role glyphs and stamped-instrument motifs. The launch overhaul pushed it to an AAA bar: every screen dissolved from bordered boxes into one continuous lit table (depth via shadow, never outline), a shared component vocabulary, and an AGSL/Skia runtime-shader material layer (film grain + warm bloom on the felt) with a graceful no-shader fallback. All behind a full Fastlane + CI pipeline with headless screenshot rendering.
New Game (1v1-1v9, Easy→Grandmaster), a KISSA story campaign, GAUNTLET (Tarakki ki Seedhi, a 5-rung ladder ending in 6-player Grandmaster), TAMASHA (spectate ten AI personas scheme and betray), Team Khel (faction play with un-targetable allies), a Tutorial you can't leave until you catch a bluff, local pass-and-play with a handoff screen guard, and online + LAN multiplayer.
Four narrative arcs run at once, fuelled or suppressed by your chat suggestions: GATHBANDHAN (a quiet coalition, watch who breaks first), AFWAAH (a rumour the table acts on even when false), STING (a leaked claim that forces a read), and BADLA (a vendetta that outlives the round). They run on a separate deterministic narrative RNG that never touches card state and resumes byte-for-byte.
All six roles use the Okabe-Ito colourblind-safe palette plus a unique engraved bezel pattern (ring, hatch, dots, weave, double-rule, ticks) so identity reads without colour. Reduced-motion mode swaps every beat for a bespoke static end-frame (GHOTALA = held stamp, SUPARI = tipped chair). Accessibility never flattens the narrative.
An AiProvider interface abstracts Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, on-device Gemini Nano (Android) and Apple FoundationModels (iOS 26); ISMCTS is the always-available offline fallback. Bring-your-own-key, stored in each platform's encrypted storage.
Online and LAN play (private room codes, quick-match, Bonjour/mDNS discovery) run on a Ktor/Netty server that holds all state; clients receive only their redacted PlayerView, so another player's face-down roles can't appear on the wire by construction.
Seven additive rule variants (Bail Pe Bahar, Bali Khel, Hawala, Adhyadesh, Khazana Raj, Mehengai, Tangi) combine freely and default off. The engine is byte-for-byte unchanged when they're disabled, expanding the surface without touching core logic.
// cast
The Politician: Tax +3 (GHOTALA); blocks Foreign Aid
The Don: Assassinate −3 (SUPARI); unblockable except by the Vakil
The Bureaucrat: Steal 2 (VASOOLI); blocks Steal
The Fixer: Exchange cards (SETTING); blocks Steal
The Lawyer: no action; blocks Assassinate only (power through procedure)
The Journalist: Investigate a card (JAANCH); unblockable
// architecture
// under the hood
// directions
Pick a treatment to see it whole. Where one ships a dark counterpart, drag the divider to compare the two faces of it — same layout, same content, only the light changes.
// gallery
Swipe or use the arrows · tap a screen to enlarge
frequently asked
SDE-2, Android & Product Owner at Dice.tech (June 2023 - Present), platform owner of the app behind 50k+ monthly active users (22k+ daily, platform owner at Dice.tech). See the source.
Took GPS accuracy to 95%: up from 50%, by predictive dead reckoning. See the source.
80% crash reduction: Crashlytics + structured concurrency fixes. See the source.
~87% of the UI layer: 455k of 523k UI-layer LOC, verified screen by screen against the legacy XML. See the source.
B.Tech, Computer Science & Engineering, NIT Bhopal (MANIT) (2017 - 2021). See the source.
Consulting Engineer, Platform & AI at Neev Consulting (April 2026 - Present). Built the LLM assistant layer of an ERPNext/Frappe consulting ERP: business-context resolution, capability discovery, and an AI capability gate that defaults OFF with a test proving it. Models client to project to PO to milestone to GST invoice to payment end to end. See the source.
Doori: Offline-first mileage, travel & expense tracker on one Kotlin codebase across Android, iOS, Wear OS, watchOS & Desktop. See the source.
Gaddi: A Hinglish social-deduction bluffing game of power, satire & second chances. Gaddi ke liye kuch bhi karega. See the source.
PaymentsLab-KMP: An Integration Lab for the Android payments ecosystem: every gateway behind one abstraction, with a live look at what actually happens on each transaction. See the source.
Candidai: A native, multiplatform AI career-intelligence engine, and the open-source project it's built on. See the source.
Yes: The Loopdown, his field-notes writing hub, where the recurring bug characters are named after real production incidents. See the source.
Answered by his own teammates, not by him: see the EB Profiles, one question per member, in their own words. See the source.
Open to remote (worldwide / India) and hybrid in Pune / Bengaluru. Email siddharthpandalai990@gmail.com. See the source.
Shared Kotlin Multiplatform libraries used across his own apps, plus merged upstream pull requests on career-ops: see the repos and the running count. See the source.
Yes: see the Play Store shelf for the apps that are actually live and installable, not just source. See the source.
Every route on the site, as a tile you can open: 3D builds, labs and canvases, not screenshots. See the source.